New Books in Art

Jan 19 2025 895 ep. 54 mins 1.5k
New Books in Art Podcast artwork

Interviews with Scholars of Art about their New Books

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Elizabeth King and W. David Todd, "Miracles and Machines: A Sixteenth-Century Automaton and Its Legend" (Getty, 2023)

Jan 19 2025 50 mins  
Miracles and Machines: A Sixteenth-Century Automaton and Its Legend (Getty Publications, 2023) tells the singular story of an uncanny, rare object at the cusp of art and science: a 450-year-old automaton known as “the monk.” The walking, gesticulating figure of a friar, in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, is among the earlie

(Re)Making Radio with the Shortwave Collective

Jan 13 2025 56 mins  
The Shortwave Collective describe themselves as “an international feminist group using the radio spectrum as artistic material.” I was first intrigued by their piece Receive-Transmit-Receive, an exquisite corpse of audio, in which members each contributed their own recordings of sounds from across the radio spectrum. But what really affected me was their ongoing public educatio

Aurelia Campbell, "What the Emperor Built: Architecture and Empire in the Early Ming" (U Washington Press, 2020)

Jan 06 2025 63 mins  
One of the most famous rulers in Chinese history, the Yongle emperor (r. 1402–24) gained renown for constructing Beijing’s magnificent Forbidden City, directing ambitious naval expeditions, and creating the world’s largest encyclopedia. What the Emperor Built: Architecture and Empire in the Early Ming (U Washington Press, 2020) is the first book-length study devoted to the ar

Fernando Domínguez Rubio, "Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Jan 03 2025 63 mins  
How do you keep the cracks in Starry Night from spreading? How do you prevent artworks made of hugs or candies from disappearing? How do you render a fading photograph eternal—or should you attempt it at all? These are some of the questions that conservators, curators, registrars, and exhibition designers dealing with contemporary art face on a daily basis. In Still Life: Ecologi

Deborah Willis, "The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship" (NYU Press, 2021)

Jan 02 2025 87 mins  
Photography emerged in the 1840s in the United States, and it became a visual medium that documents the harsh realities of enslavement. Similarly, the photography culture grew during the Civil War, and it became an important material that archived this unprecedented war. Deborah Willis's The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship (New York University

Shannan Clark, "The Making of the American Creative Class: New York's Culture Workers and 20th-Century Consumer Capitalism" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Jan 02 2025 66 mins  
During the middle decades of the twentieth century, the production of America’s consumer culture was centralized in New York to an extent unparalleled in the history of the United States. Every day tens of thousands of writers, editors, artists, performers, technicians, and secretaries made advertisements, produced media content, and designed the shape and feel of the consumer ec

Rachel Emily Taylor, "Illustration and Heritage" (Bloombury, 2024)

Dec 27 2024 27 mins  
In Illustration and Heritage (Bloomsbury, 2024), Rachel Emily Taylor explores the re-materialisation of absent, lost, and invisible stories through illustrative practice and examines the potential role of contemporary illustration in cultural heritage. Heritage is a 'process' that is active and takes place in the present. In the heritage industry, there are opposing discourses and

Theresa Flanigan, "The Ponte Vecchio: Architecture, Politics, and Civic Identity in Late Medieval Florence" (Brepols, 2024)

Dec 21 2024 49 mins  
Famous today for the shops lining its sloped street, the Ponte Vecchio is the last premodern bridge spanning the Arno River at Florence and one of the few remaining examples of the once more prevalent urbanized bridge type. Drawing from early Florentine chronicles and previously unpublished archival documents, The Ponte Vecchio: Architecture, Politics, and Civic Identity in Late Me

Erich Hatala Matthes, "What to Save and Why: Identity, Authenticity, and the Ethics of Conservation" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Dec 19 2024 43 mins  
Today I’m speaking with Erich Hatala Matthes, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Advisory Faculty for Environmental Studies at Wellesley College. We are discussing his Oxford University Press, What to Save and Why: Identity, Authenticity, and the Ethics of Conservation (Oxford University Press, 2024). Erich’s book explores the idea of conservation: the practice of preserving

Aesthetic Conversions

Dec 16 2024 21 mins  
Paloma Checa-Gismero talks about the many processes of re-evaluation, re-contextualization, and re-animation that designates an object as art. To illustrate this point, she calls our attention to the work of artists like Mierle Laderman Ukeles in the 1970s, or the 1989 exhibition titled Magiciens de la terre at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. She develops the concept of aesth